Music Week

Ratings down a bit due to the holidays -- I cooked traditional family
fare for my sister and nephew on Xmas Eve, then next day drove out to a
nearby farm for dinner with a cousin and his wife's family -- and also
due to the Pazz & Jop ballot deadline. After kicking some things
around, I filed the following ballot a day early:

I'm reasonably satisfied with the albums list, although you might
note that the Threadgill album is higher (6 vs. 9) on my official
2015-in-progress list than several
non-jazz albums on the ballot, and four more jazz albums are on the
list ahead of Heems:

Schlippenbach Trio: Features (Intakt)

Mike Reed's People Places & Things: A New Kind of Dance (482 Music)

Joe Fiedler Trio: I'm In (Multiphonics Music)

Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (Clean Feed)

I don't like the idea that Pazz & Jop should be the non-jazz
(actually, rock/rap-only) forum it effectively is, but I've already
touted the jazz records above in the
Jazz Critics Poll, but at the moment felt like spreading the
action around a bit. (Actually, I doubt that I'll be the only person
voting for Schweizer/Bennink or Threadgill in Pazz & Jop, and
might not have been the only one for Reed and Lightcap, although I
will be surprised if any of the others clear a vote.) I've been
keeping separate
Jazz and
Non-Jazz EOY
lists for several years now, but I don't think I've ever skewed
the scales before. This may just be a temporary aberration,
but it also has something to do with the way I've been working,
which keeps me from really falling in love with practically any
of the records I've been recommending.

At this point, I still only have two full-A records for 2015
(whereas Christgau has 9 plus 1 A+, not counting anything he
has in reserve, and Tatum has 7 plus 3 A+, not counting Courtney
Barnett [number 4 on his P&J ballot]). I did manage to play
six of my ballot picks this week, but didn't move any of them
up from A- to A -- most years I move 4-5 up, so I can't say if
this is the records or me. (I also rechecked 4 albums I had filed
in the B+ range, all records that Christgau had A-listed, and did
move three up to A-, which helps even out the Jazz/Non-Jazz lists --
currently 71 to 59. The straggler was Jamie XX's In Colour,
certainly a fine album but not enough so to get me to do all the
associated paperwork.)

I also replayed the consensus record of the year, Kendrick Lamar's
To Pimp a Butterfly, but never gave it all the time it seems
to demand. And while I flagged it as a very solid A- the first time
I streamed it, it's never cohered enough to move on up. No chance it
won't win Pazz & Jop -- it's way ahead (577-381-320-285) in my
EOY List Aggregate, and no
other record has any late momentum like D'Angelo's Black Messiah
last year, or any identifiable demographic advantage -- so it felt
like it would be a wasted vote. So I nudged Heems above it: not sure
it's the better album, but it might be, and is the more interesting
choice. Among other things, it makes for two Asian-American rappers
on my list. (For what it's worth, Heems will do better in P&J than
it has in my EOY List Aggregate: its support is almost exclusively
concentrated among Christgau's Expert Witnesses, who amount to a block
of 20-30 voters. The effect should be about midway between Wussy and
Withered Hand in 2014, where Wussy rose from 66 to 24, and Withered
Hand from 100 to 92, but note that I'm working with final metafile
tallies for 2014, which already include a lot of individual ballots
from the Expert Witness poll. Currently I only have a few of them --
and haven't counted any points for Christgau, Tatum, or myself -- so
Heems at 142 is probably a bit better than Withered Hand was at the
same stage. I predict it will get 15-20 P&J votes and end up in
the 50-70 range. Last year Wussy got 29 and Withered Hand got 8.)

On the other hand, I have no confidence in my songs list. I almost
didn't bother, but wanted to tout Chris Lightcap's Velvet Underground
cover -- especially since I skipped over his album. It then occurred
to me that I could pick songs from other albums that missed the cut --
Lamar, of course, plus Furman, Gwenno, Monroe, and especially Tuxedo
(the year's most memorable single). I looked a couple friends' lists,
and watched 10-15 videos (more than I've done all year), picking out
songs that seemed good enough. I wound up with two non-album singles
that
Dan Weiss likes, and one choice cut from an album that otherwise
I don't much care for (Jason Derulo's). Also the standout track from
one of the few EPs I graded A-.

Certainly a decent list, but one that I'm sure could have been
improved had I spent a few more days checking things out, especially
if I considered cuts from my top-ten albums ("Free People" would
easily have made the list, and very likely "Flag Shopping"). I sort
of get the appeal of "best songs" lists on two levels: I grew up in
an era when we first heard music on AM radio (KLEO was my station)
and bought 45s, so it seems perfectly natural to me to segue "Wild
Thing," say, into "Woolly Bully." Until 1965 I didn't even have a
record player that could play LPs, and I doubt that I bought twenty
of them through the end of the decade. On the other hand, by the
early 1970s we came to think of LP sides as integral works of art,
meant to be consumed whole, and from 1970 up to about 1977 I doubt
I bought a single 45 -- good chance the record that broke that
streak was "God Save the Queen."

I also approve, at least in principle, of the idea of programming
your own playlists, something that home computers made accessible to
the masses. However, I've never gotten the hang of the technology,
not so much because I find it incomprehensible as because it doesn't
suit the way I work. Even streaming, I rarely bother with anything
but album-length chunks, because that still makes sense to me as the
unit to write about -- and for today, at least, I mostly listen to
write. I can imagine at some point turning back inward and starting
to reduce my collection to its rare finest moments, but that's mostly
to eliminate clutter. (At some point I suspect all collections decay
into clutter.) Nor am I sure that constant exposure to brilliance
would be such a good thing. I suspect I'd get too used to it.

The other thing that bothers me about "best songs" is how much
they are tied to videos. I hated MTV when it started to exercise
its tyranny over popular music in the 1980s. My initial complaint
was how it added an extraneous and expensive obstacle for music
to reach the public. Moreover, it worked to select popular music
by how photogenic the musicians were. Of course, since then music
videos have been democratized (and amateurized) with the usual
mixed bag of results. My research this year consisted of nothing
more than watching Youtube videos, which were equally divided
between nonsensical collages and Bollywood-worthy dance numbers.
(Conceiving singles as studio product, I didn't bother with the
third great class: live performance documents.) So inadvertently
I bought into the notion that it's not a song unless it comes
packaged in a video.

I've also been invited to participate in El Intruso's 8th Creative
Music Critics Poll. I think it's based in Argentina, and the focus is
avant-jazz. About half of the 40+ critics are Americans I recognize.
Instructions call for no more than three answers in each category.
Most of those categories are instruments, which raises all sorts of
awkward problems -- it's hard enough to rank albums, but I don't
really believe in ranking people, so the names I jotted down below
are just ones I thought could use some extra recognition. Also note
that the instruments themselves weren't created equal: I could reel
off the names of twenty tenor saxophonists (and fifteen altoists)
before I could get to a third soprano or baritone. Also, while there
are quite a few good acoustic bassists who also play electric, I
hardly ever recognize them as such. Final point is I spent less than
half an hour doing this, mostly by looking back over last year's
notes file. Anyhow, this is what I sent in:

Musician of the year: Allen Lowe

Newcomer Musician: Tomeka Reid, Gard Nilssen, Katie Thiroux

Group of the year: Old Time Musketry, The Kandinsky Effect, The Resonance Ensemble

Newcomer group: Free Nelson Mandoomjazz

Album of the year: Irene Schweizer/Han Bennink: Welcome Back (Intakt)

Composer: Mike Reed

Drums: Milford Graves, Gerry Hemingway, Michael Zerang

Acoustic Bass: William Parker, Chris Lightcap, Ken Filiano

Electric Bass: Nate McBride

Guitar: Liberty Ellman, Samo Salamon, Mary Halvorson

Piano: Irene Schweizer, Marilyn Crispell, Michael McNeill

Keyboards/Synthesizer/Organ: Gary Versace

Tenor Saxophone: Dave Rempis, Rich Halley, Rodrigo Amado

Alto Saxophone: Francois Carrier, Rent Romus, John O'Gallagher

Baritone Saxophone: Ken Vandermark

Soprano Saxophone: Evan Parker

Trumpet/Cornet: Taylor Ho Bynum, Amir ElSaffar, Kirk Knuffke

Clarinet/bass clarinet: Michael Moore, Mort Weiss, Josh Sinton

Trombone: Steve Swell, Joe Fiedler

Flute: Nicole Mitchell

Violin/Viola: Jason Kao Hwang

Cello: Erik Friedlander, Fred Lonberg-Holm

Vibraphone: Jason Adasiewicz, Joe Locke

Electronics: Thomas Stronen

Others instruments: Cooper-Moore

Female Vocals: Sheila Jordan, Katie Bull

Male Vocals: Freddy Cole

Best Live Band: Mostly Other People Do the Killing

Record Label: Clean Feed, Intakt, Pi

It would, I think, be more interesting if they did more of a record
poll, especially if the ballots could extend beyond a top ten.

Probably the first week ever where everything in the newly rated
list came from streaming. I did play several records in the new jazz
queue but didn't get around to writing them up. My first impression
is that Allen Lowe's In the Diaspora of the Diaspora would
have easily added up to an A- had he packed them into a box, but
releasing them individually is making me do more work. Steve Swell's
Hommage à Bartok is also certainly an A-, but he begged me
to write "more than your usual" and nothing slows me down like that.

Also spent a lot of time adding to the EOY List Aggregate files,
but have no time left to write about them. Maybe next week, or when
Pazz & Jop comes out (January 13). As of this moment I have 318
lists compiled, referencing 3126 albums. Still working on it, but
I have a pretty good idea how it all sorts out (Kendrick Lamar,
Sufjan Stevens, Courtney Barnett, Jamie XX, Father John Misty,
Tame Impala, Grimes, Julia Holter, Bjork, Sleater-Kinney, Vince
Staples, Kamasi Washington, Joanna Newsom, Oneohtrix Point Never;
4-5-6 are pretty close but fairly stable; 9-12 are even closer
and more volatile; 14 is gaining, but has too much ground to make
up to bump 13; the rest of the top-20 are Kurt Vile, Carly Jepsen,
Blur, Drake, Alabama Shakes, Viet Cong, and they're still likely
to change).

Music Week

The Tenth Annual Jazz Critics Poll, which Francis Davis started
at the Village Voice, then after the Voice tanked kept going first
at Rhapsody and now at NPR, appeared today. In 2009 Voice Music
Editor Rob Harvilla asked me to compile and host all of the critic
ballots, and I've continued doing so through all of the subsequent
gyrations. Deadline for the ballots was last Sunday, and Davis
forwarded them to me on Tuesday or Wednesday, but I putzed around
and didn't start on them until Saturday. That wiped out my weekend
and, well, today, and I still have work to do. Among other things,
I figured out a system for double checking the collated ballots
against Francis' tabulations. When I first got all of the data
plugged in, my diff-checker spit out 480 lines of discrepancies --
roughly 120 of about 650 albums that received votes. Since then,
one of the main things I've been doing has been to whittle down
that discrepancy list. As I write this, I have it down to five
more records that I have to check. It's fair to say that about
half of those have been errors in Francis' original tabulation,
and half were problems I introduced during data entry.

A second category of changes has to do with a sort of canonic
representation of artist/title/label names. Francis doesn't like
spurious group names attached to artist names so, say, The Gabriel
Alegria Afro-Peruvian Sextet becomes Gabriel Alegria, Steve Coleman
and the Council of Balance is Steve Coleman, and Satoko Fujii Tobira
is just Satoko Fujii. He also doesn't like slashes for multiple
artists -- says they mean either/or -- so two artists use &
and three or more use dashes, even when the album itself uses
slashes (although more likely they just use space). Part of the
reason is no doubt practical: when 147 meticulous critics and
supposedly literate writers jot down lists, the sheer quantity
of variations they come up with is mind-boggling. Still, several
of these canonicalizations are arguable, and some are far from
clear. At some point in the ballot collating process I get to
comparing the data hacked according to his rules with a similar
set of data I've been accumulating (with different rules) all
year long. Unfortunately, that point is still in the future --
probably when I get around to feeding a fair amount of ballot
data into my own
EOY List Aggregate
file (which, by the way, has significantly less jazz data
now than it
has in recent years, mostly because so few jazz critics have
been using the
JJA website to post their lists/ballots). Still, if I had
some magical way to filter out the non-majority-jazz lists, my
data would have reasonably well anticipated the JCP results.
(Kamasi Washington and Matana Roberts would have lost most, but
far from all, of their support, and Colin Stetson would have
lost everything -- curiously enough Stetson's is my favorite
of those three.) The main blip I see is that Jack DeJohnette
ran much better in JCP, while Vijay Iyer (and JD Allen) ran a
bit better in my sparser data. (I haven't weighed my own grades
into my data yet, so that isn't a factor.)

There are two main pages at NPR to look at:

The 2015 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll, where Francis Davis presents
a list of the top sixty finishers, with paragraph write-ups on the top
ten finishers. (Davis voted for six of the ten -- Rudresh Mahanthappa,
Maria Schneider, Jack DeJohnette, Vijay Iyer, Henry Threadgill, and
Mary Halvorson -- and had one more (Steve Coleman) in his HM list
(leaving Kamasi Washington, Charles Lloyd, and Chris Lightcap -- only
Washington gets much of a critique).

Much more data is available at
my site, including
complete totals for all five categories (new, reissue/historical,
vocal, debut, Latin jazz) and complete ballots for all of the 147
participating
critics.
This site isn't built on a full-fledged database, but the data is
internally tabled up in such a way that one need only write a little
more software to organize it like, say, the Village Voice's Pazz
& Jop section: one would need a script to list out all of the
critics who voted for any given album, and another to fetch the
ballot for any single critic -- plus a lot of extra links in each
file, and some CSS to present those links. I actually wrote the
second script in a couple hours last year, so critics could link
to their own ballots (mine is
here) without confusing the issue by picking up
other critics' ballots. Unfortunately, I only think about writing
things like this when I'm up to my ears facing an annual deadline,
stuck with more pressing things to do.

I don't have time to comment on the results, other than to
make the obvious point that I'm not much of a fan of either of
the winning records (although it's been quite some time since
I played either; I have them at low- and middle-B+ grades).
I've liked Mahanthappa's work much more in the past, but don't
get (or find interesting) his postbop take on Charlie Parker
(my issue is definitely not that I find the record too bebop-y).
And while I enjoyed Schneider's new album more than her previous
much-hyped work, her ornate expressionism has scant appeal for
me. I'm not real disappointed to see these two records doing so
well: I figure they're just different strokes for different
folks, especially ones grounded in classical but open to the
greater vitality of postmodern jazz. (I, on the other hand, have
always detested classical music, and look to jazz that builds on
the rowdy subversion I first found in rock and roll.)

The next two finishers don't do much for me either. For Jack
DeJohnette, the problem is (most likely) purely business. Since
ECM stopped servicing me with actual product, I've had to make do
with time-limited download links I often don't get to in time, and
I missed the DeJohnette link -- and didn't get a second chance,
despite several requests. So I simply haven't heard a record that
looks great on paper and has a terrific reputation. Then there's
the matter of Kamasi Washington: again I didn't get a copy -- a
real practical problem for something that fills up three CDs --
again despite a further request. However, I was able to hear it
on Rhapsody, and recently gave it a second complete spin. I do
like him as a saxophonist, and the '70s-throwback-vibe that Davis
complains about is one of my favorite jazz era-niches, but I don't
get off on the electro-flavored choral goop that fills most of
the first two discs. (Complicit in all of this is Steve Ellson,
aka Flying Lotus, whose own work leaves me cold.)

In the end, I only had two of the top 10 albums on my
A-list (with
this week's bonanza 71 albums deep -- Threadgill and Lightcap
were also on my ballot). Add one more for 11-20 (Ryan Truesdell),
a clump of five in 21-30 (Mike Reed, Matthew Shipp, Amir ElSaffar,
Liberty Ellman, Nicole Mitchell). Three for 31-40 (Irène Schweizer,
MOPDtK, Barry Altschul). Two in 41-50 (Noah Preminger, Tomeka Reid).
Four more for 51-60 (Erik Friedlander, James Brandon Lewis, Gary
McFarland Legacy Ensemble, Joe Lovano). It thins out further from
there, mostly because the number of records I haven't heard grows.
For instance, only six more from 61-100 (Ochion Jewell, Milford
Graves, Alex von Schlippenbach, William Parker, Satoko Fujii,
Michael Blake -- Steve Swell's record just came in the mail).
Only seven from 101-200 (Josh Berman, Charles McPherson, Nate
Wooley, Ray Anderson, Tomas Fujiwara, Rich Halley, Chico Freeman).

No doubt I'll find more good records by sniffing around the
ballots -- actually, more so than by looking at the totals.
While working on the ballots, I spent my time streaming items
I found there, and indeed came up with two A- records this week
(Ray Anderson and Tomeka Reid; the Bobby Bradford/John Carter
archival release was already in my CD queue, as were voteless
discs by François Carrier and and Andrew Jamieson; Daniel
Rosenboom also got no votes, but was recommended in another
EOY list somewhere; same for Max Richter, which I gather is
classical music, but it sure fooled me).

Rhapsody Streamnotes (December 2015)

Daily Log

From a letter I wrote today:

One thing I want to mention is that I thoroughly butchered that
book I mentioned. The author is David Fromkin (not Dworkin), and the
title is "A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and
the Creation of the Modern Middle East." It was written in 1989, so
there are other books since then that cover the same ground, but it's
been republished several times since then.

I don't think anyone has written a really good book on the way
European imperialism picked at the carcass of the Ottoman Empire over
the long 19th century -- roughly from 1798 (Napoleon's invasion of
Egypt; cf. Juan Cole's "Napoleon's Egypt") and 1804 (the Serbian
Revolt; cf. Misha Glenny's "The Balkans") up through the Balkan Wars
(1912-13), the Great War and the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) -- and
the Turks' often-futile efforts at modernization (and even more
fateful, the occasional efforts the Ottomans made at alliances with
various European powers) during that period. Actually, would need to
go one step further to encompass Ataturk's reforms, which is when the
modernization finally took root. The difficulty has been that Western
authors are congenitally insensitive to the self-interested
hypocrisies of the West and disrespectful to those not so
indoctrinated -- I think this is what Said tried to critique as
Orientalism, although I gather he didn't do a very good job of
it. After all, for every Lawrence or Bell who understood something,
there were scads of bureaucrats fated to abuse any legitimate
insights. This is, of course, a problem that persists in America
today.

By the way, speaking of books, I would like to plug Gilles Kepel's
"Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam." Written (or rather translated
into English) in 2000, Kepel traces both the deobandi and salafist
strains of jihadism, and finds those movements nearing exhaustion by
2000. He later described the 2001 attack as something of a "hail Mary
pass" -- unfortunately, George Bush, for his own perverse reasons,
intercepted it and ran it into the wrong end zone.

Music Week

Didn't bother with a Weekend Roundup yesterday. I figure there will
be plenty of opportunities in the future, and had something better --
at least more constructive -- to do. When we lived in Boston, we used
to be regularly invited to Hannukah parties, which aside from anecdotes
that were more historical than religious was mostly an excuse to pig
out on latkes -- fried potato pancakes. Since then I've learned to fry
up my own latkes, and we throw a nice little dinner party every year
sometime around the holiday, and last night was this year's occasion.

The latkes are pretty straightforward, although my recipe has strayed
from the one I reference in Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food.
What I did last night was:

Peeled and soaked five russet potatoes.

Peeled and chopped two yellow onions. Put them in a large bowl.

Added five eggs, some salt and pepper to the onions.

Dried the potatoes and ran them through the coarse shred food processor
disc, then chopped them up further with the blade. Folded the potatoes into
the bowl, and added a little more pepper.

Fired up two frying pans. Added vegetable oil (safflower) a little
less than 1/4 inch deep. I have a large salad spoon which is about right
to scoop up about 3 tbs. of potato-onion-egg mixture. I could put four
scoops in a frying pan at a time, flattening them into four pancakes.
When they're good and brown around the edges, flip them over. When done
I put them on a platter lined with paper towels. I meant to keep them
in a warming oven but ultimately didn't bother.

Repeat until done.

I suspect you can get away with four (instead of five) eggs (Roden's
recipe calls for one, and makes onions optional). The mix did get to
be a little soupy toward the end. I don't use any flour to bindn the
latkes together (matzo meal is traditional; potato starch is gluten-free
and probably better), but the extra egg works fine. In past dinners
I served the latkes hot out of the pan, which is nice for the guests
but means the dinner is done before the cook can sit down. Also, I like
to make some side dishes, which start out on the table and tend to get
eaten while the guests are waiting for latkes.

Latkes are traditionally served with sour cream and applesauce. I
bought sour cream and served it in several dishes. I made applesauce,
improvising on Roden's recipe:

Bought two Braeburn and two Red Delicious apples. Quartered, peeled,
and cored them. Put them in a sauce pan, with one tsp. water and the
juice from one small lemon. Covered and steamed them until they could
be broken up easily.

Crushed them with a potato masher. Added 2 tbs. light brown sugar,
and a generous 1/2 tsp. of that really nice Vietnamese Cinnamon I get
from Penzey's.

My favorite way to eat latkes is with sour cream and a slice of cured
salmon. For the latter, I bought a pound of Scottish salmon cut from the
tail. Following Roden's recipe, I packed the salmon with 1.5 tbs. kosher
salt in a freezer bag, and stored it in the refrigerator for 12 hours
(actually, a little longer). Take it from the bag, rinse it off, and
test it for saltiness. If it's too salty, you can soak it in cold water
for as long as it takes. Slice and serve.

That's all it really takes, but over the years I've added some side
dishes. I usually serve some herring -- alas, from the Nathan's jars,
as it's been a long time since I've been able to buy matjes or schmaltz
herring locally -- and chopped liver (I used to use Roden's recipe, but
now prefer Ottolenghi's Jerusalem). For yesterday's menu I got
carried away and added some vegetable salads/spreads:

I had an eggplant and red bell pepper left over and some very ripe
homegrown tomatoes someone had given me, so tried a variation on the
Odessa Eggplant Caviar recipe in Anya Von Bremzen's Russian cookbook,
Please to the Table. Main difference was that I roasted the
onion and garlic along with everything else.

Von Bremzen also had a Mushroom Caviar recipe I was intrigued by,
and I found a package of "wild mushrooms" on sale, to which I added
some baby portabellas. I could have passed the result off as chopped
liver.

I also had a couple of cucumbers that needed to be used, and
most of a package of plain yogurt, so mixed up Von Bremzen's version
of cacik -- yogurt with garlic, mint, and a little olive oil.

I figured the spreads, especially the chopped liver, needed
something more substantial to top than the latkes, so halved Roden's
recipe and baked a loaf of rye bread.

Most of the spreads were made the night before -- the eggplant,
etc. were roasted the night before that -- so the actual cooking
on Sunday was fairly light, and actually relaxing in that I let it
displace everything else I usually do -- Weekend Roundup, a day
and a half of rating records. Rated count this week is still quite
respectable, and you'll find a very wide range of interesting music
listed below. I also reduced the 2015 jazz queue to virtually nothing
(just that cassette; even nabbed four Xmas albums below, only one
even marginally recommended), although incoming mail has since added
a few stragglers -- a critic's work is never done.

Most of the non-jazz records below were found on EOY lists, although
few of them panned out. However, the best stuff continues to come from
trusted critics: two string band obscurities recommended by Robert
Christgau (Have Moicy 2 continues to elude me), a drag queen
thing Lucas Fagen likes, a mixtape Jason Gubbels praised in Spin.
I toyed with picking on Peter Gabriel over the Youssou N'Dour concert,
but in the end decided I'd rather be grateful. The Sharrock reissue
is an upgrade from my original B+. I can't argue that the new album is
any better (although I do prefer the new cover), but I played it many
times while cooking, enough to appreciate some of the nuances in the
drums and sax. Or maybe I just appreciate getting a physical copy?
That doesn't happen often with reissues.

I got delayed in posting this as I was trying to bring the EOY
aggregate files up to date -- even thinking I'd comment on them a
bit. I currently have 162 lists counted (see
legend). You can look at
the current state of the
New Music and
Old Music lists.
I will briefly note that the top three albums (Kendrick Lamar,
Sufjan Stevens, Courtney Barnett) seem secure and unlikely to
change. The next three are very close together (Jamie XX, Tame
Impala, Father John Misty). After Julia Holter, three albums
have nudged their way into the top ten (Björk, Grimes, Vince
Staples), displacing Kamasi Washington and Sleater Kinney (I
think Björk was previously 10th).

In the next ten, the top gainers are Oneohtrix Point Never
(16), Blue (17), and Carly Jepsen (18) -- up from 22, 30, and
20 last week. Very few new jazz lists this week, so the top
jazz records have dropped relative to everyone else. Francis
Davis' Jazz Critics Poll results are due to be published Dec.
21, so I'll be able to add more then. The total number of new
albums so far is 1986. The Old Music list is much sparser, only
171 deep at present, with a tie between Legacy's Miles Davis
and Bob Dylan Bootleg Series entries.

One note I might as well mention here. This was originally written
a few days ago as a comment to a Facebook post by a Witness bemoaning
that he had looked through three EOY lists (Rolling Stone, Spin, and
Paste) and hadn't seen any mention of Ezra Furman, Heems, or Paris.
However, for some reason (maybe tardiness) the comment bounced, so I
thought I'd make it public here:

Main reason I'm replying is to point that that Ezra Furman has
done respectably well on many UK lists (4: Rough Trade; 5: God Is in
the TV; 25: Guardian, Resident Music; 30: Q; 31: Mojo; 43: Uncut; 47:
Louder Than War; unranked: Line of Best Fit); on the other hand, I
only count two US lists (24: Loud & Quiet; 34: LA Music Blog). Heems
only has one general list (63: PopMatters; actually, I also counted
him on Phil Overeem's list), although he shows up on a couple of
hip-hop sidelists (AMG, Quietus). Paris hasn't appeared on any list
anywhere (i.e., less than the 1804 records I've counted so far). Paris
is one of 9 Christgau A-list albums on no lists so far (Bottle
Rockets, Leonard Cohen, Amy LaVere, Nellie McKay, Ragpicker String
Band, Slutever, Tinariwen, Have Moicy 2 -- or 12 if we ignore
Overeem's sole mention of John Kruth, Paranoid Style, and Mark
Rubin).

One more bit of news is that I've actually frozen the December Rhapsody
Streamnotes file. I'll try to get it indexed and posted tomorrow -- the
way things have been going, probably late evening.

New records rated this week:

Alaska Thunderfuck: Anus (2015, Sidecar): [r]: A-

Asylum Street Spankers: The Last Laugh (2014, Yellow Dog): [r]: A-

Erykah Badu: But You Caint Use My Phone (2015, Control Freaq): [r]: A-

Music Week

Running a day late here: internet went down ("for maintenance,"
says Cox) last night, which not only prevent posting, it also threw
a wrench into my writing. But also various distractions kept cropping
up, not least the fact that there's always something new to be added
to the
EOY Aggregate File.

Another big week, despite some down time, or perhaps I mean diverted
time. The deadline for the Jazz Critics Poll was Sunday, so the most
urgent thing I had to do was to straighten out a very unruly list of
sixty-plus poorly sorted A- new jazz albums. Almost as badly sorted
were my shelves, so while I replayed a few better-remembered candidates.
Ultimately I came up with something I'm reasonably pleased with, but
I don't have much confidence that the same list would have resulted
from extensive A:B comparison rounds.

It helped, somewhat perversely, to start toting up some EOY jazz
lists, especially those at
JJA. The net effect there was to reassure me that I couldn't do
worse. This has less to do with the ordinariness of the leaders --
Maria Schneider's The Thompson Fields, Vijay Iyer's Break
Stuff, Rudresh Mahanthappa's Bird Calls, Steve Coleman's
Synovial Joints, as well as Kamasi Washington's crossover hit
The Epic, all more-or-less B+ records -- than with the rather
frequent inclusion of more mediocre postbop fare.

I've managed to whittle my ungraded 2015 new jazz queue down to
10 titles (plus the non-jazz Kansas album): 4 of those arrived last
week, 3 are Xmas titles, 1 is a cassette I no longer have the means
to play. Even though the ballot is in, there will be more discoveries,
probably sooner rather than later. I just discovered this week that
AUM Fidelity -- a label I used to have such good relations with that
now I regard their lack of service as proof of my inability to keep
going -- has just released old music by David S. Ware (Birth of a
Being from 1977) and not-so-old music by William Parker (Great
Spirit from 2007). At least I found those two on Rhapsody -- their
other Parker set, the 3-CD box of For Those Who Are Still
(recorded 2011-13) doesn't seem to be on Rhapsody.

I found out about the AUM Fidelity releases from
Tim Niland's EOY list. He also voted for new records I haven't
heard by Paul Dunmall/Tony Bianco, The Thing, John Zorn, plus a Sonny
Rollins oldie. I rated 5 of his 7 other picks A-, so there's a good
chance the ones I haven't heard would rate well. In past years it
usually takes 1-3 days before I find another A- record, and 1-3 weeks
before I find a record that would have bumped the 10th pick on my
ballot off the list. That hasn't happened yet, but it's just a matter
of time.

Anyhow, here's my Jazz Critics Poll ballot:

10 best new releases:

Irène Schweizer/Han Bennink: Welcome Back (Intakt)

Henry Threadgill Zooid: In for a Penny, In for a Pound (Pi, 2CD)

Schlippenbach Trio: Features (Intakt)

Mike Reed's People Places & Things: A New Kind of Dance (482 Music)

Joe Fiedler Trio: I'm In (Multiphonics Music)

Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter (Clean Feed)

Charles McPherson: The Journey (Capri)

Rich Halley 4: Creating Structure (Pine Eagle)

Rodrigo Amado: This Is Our Language (Not Two)

Mort Weiss: Mort Weiss Is a Jazz Reality Show (SMS Jazz)

3 best reissues or historical albums:

Anthony Braxton: Trio and Duet (1974, Delmark/Sackville)

Wild Bill Davison: The Jazz Giants (1968, Delmark/Sackville)

Willem Breuker Kollektief: Angoulême 18 Mai 1980 (Fou, 2CD)

Best vocal album:

William Parker/Raining on the Moon: Great Spirit (AUM Fidelity)

Best debut album:

Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity: Firehouse (Clean Feed)

Best Latin jazz album:

Harry Allen's All-Star Brazilian Band: Flying Over Rio (Arbors)

I didn't have any A-list vocalist albums, but the William Parker album
is all songs with vocals, and Leena Conquest is terrific there. The Ernest
Dawkins album also has some vocals, and there may be a couple more marginal
cases (Rent Romus, Mort Weiss). HM vocal albums are not rare but tend to
be eccentric:

Tony Adamo: Tony Adamo & the New York Crew (Urban Zone)

Sarah Buechi: Shadow Garden (Intakt)

The Katie Bull Group Project: All Hot Bodies Radiate (Ashokan Indie)

Michael Dees: The Dream I Dreamed (Jazzed Media)

Oleg Frish: Duets With My American Idols (Time Out Media)

Heroes Are Gang Leaders: The Avant Age Garde I AMs of the Gal Luxury (Flat Langton's Arkeyes)

Nancy Lane: Let Me Love You (self-released)

Tiny People Having a Meeting (Fast Speaking Music)

Bradley Williams: Investigation (21st Century Entertainment, 2CD)

Mark Winkler: Jazz and Other Four Letter Words (Cafe Pacific)

I have the Gary McFarland Legacy Ensemble rated slightly above Gard
Nilssen, but I figured the latter was more in spirit with "debut album" --
a new performer as opposed to a new ad hoc group of veterans. I don't
do a good job of keeping track of debuts, although Introducing Katie
Thiroux is at least one more on the A-list.

I expect Kamasi Washington to easily win the debut category. I've
been impressed by his work elsewhere (Phil Ranelin, Gerald Wilson),
but didn't get enough out of streaming The Epic to dig further.
(I made a second pass after I wrote the above. No doubt Washington
can bust a solo, but I don't enjoy the choral settings, even though
not all were annoying. Also, the third disc starts real strong,
including an amusing take on "Cherokee." He's clearly capable of
more consistently elevated albums, but unless you put a lot of
weight on the grand gesture this isn't one.)

I almost picked Ivo Perelman's Callas for the "Latin jazz"
album, before I recalled Allen's superior album. Band is Brazilian,
and he's been working this vein for years. I've come up so lean in
this category before that I've picked other Perelman albums -- he
is Brazilian but plays avant-jazz. Indeed, I usually have a handful
of Spanish and Portuguese players I could fall back on, but always
seem to have trouble coming up with conventional clave-base picks.
The HM list does have two such picks:

There's a lot of classic Latin jazz that I really like, so I'm always
a bit surprised that so few new records measure up. Makes it look like
I'm prejudiced against the stuff, but realistically, how much new hard
bop or soul jazz measures up either? I'm not an avant purist, but it
tends to dominate my list because it still offers surprises even if the
bleeding edge doesn't move much.

Nine A- records this week, but only releases this year, only five
new records, four picked up via Rhapsody. Could be that the agitprop
of Desaparecidos or the Bob Wills tribute just hit personal soft spots --
I'm certainly a sucker for the latter. The Chemical Brothers' best-of
has been on my search list for some time. It comes in two versions, so
I wound up grading it twice, but using only the 2-CD version cover.
Part of the George Lewis grade is sheer pleasant surprise: I've only
heard a handful of solo trombone records, usually avant but limited
by the instrument. The Getz and Ware reissues are every bit as good,
but I came up with quibbles. The problem with The Steamer is
that every other album by the Getz's coast quartet is better -- 1955's
West Coast Jazz especially. As for Ware, I was a bit exhausted
by the session's unrelenting fierceness.

I was steered toward Sons of Kemet by comments comparing it favorably
to Kamasi Washington's The Epic. Needless to say, I agree, but
I'd also say the same about the group's 2013 album, Burn. Among
the high HMs, the ones that came closest were the Fall and the Resonance
Ensemble: in both cases I settled for the lower grade rather than give
them an extra spin to see if they'd get better.

Overlap was one of three good records I picked up from the
Catalytic Sound
Bandcamp site. The two others are high HMs and might have been higher
had I not compared them against memories of previous similar projects.
Still more there I haven't gotten to -- especially several multi-disc
projects.

Good chance I'll post a Rhapsody Streamnotes column before the coming
week is out. Draft currently showing 120 records.

Rhania Khalek: US cops trained to use lethal Israeli tactics:
"Officers from 15 US police agencies recently traveled to the Middle
East for lessons from their Israeli counterparts." You may recall how
on 9/11 Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu were crowing about how
Israel could help the US with its newfound terrorism problem. Hell,
I'm old enough to remember when David Ben Gurion offered to help
Charles DeGaulle with its little problem in Algeria. DeGaulle
rejected that offer, fearing that Ben Gurion wanted to turn France
into another Israel. On the other hand, the neocons who dominated
the Bush administration (and who still exercise some strange magic
over Obama) envy Israel, which is one reason they organize these
junkets for American cops to learn how to use "advanced Israeli
technology" like "skunk spray" and rubber bullets. However, this
is happening at a time when Israel's own law enforcement groups
have gone on a rampage of summary executions, where they've killed
more than 100 Palestinians since October 1. Also happening at a
time when police killings of (mostly black) Americans are subject
to ever more scrutiny and outrage.

Ed Kilgore: Extremist Republican Rhetoric and the Planned Parenthood
Attack: Given the current state of rhetoric on abortion even by
such supposedly respectable as Republican presidential candidates,
it's not surprising when anti-abortion violence occurs -- if anything
the surprise is that it's as rare as it is (although living in Wichita,
where much violence and one of the most notorious murders occurred, it
pains me to write that line).

Conservative opinion-leaders should, however, be held accountable for
two persistent strains of extremist rhetoric that provide a theoretical
basis for violence against abortion providers specifically and enemies
of "traditional values" generally.

The first is the comparison of legalized abortion to the great
injustices of world history, including slavery and the Holocaust. The
first analogy helps anti-choicers think of themselves as champions of
a new civil-rights movement while facilitating a characterization of
Roe v. Wade as a temporary and disreputable constitutional precedent
like Dred Scott. The second follows from the right-to-life movement's
logic of regarding abortion as homicide and treats the millions of
legal abortions that have been performed in the U.S. since 1973 as
analogous to the Nazi extermination of Jews and other "undesirables."
[ . . . ]

And virtually every Republican presidential candidate has supported
the mendacious campaign to accuse Planned Parenthood of "barbaric"
practices involving illegal late-term abortions and "baby part sales."

But there's a second element of contemporary extremist rhetoric from
conservatives that brings them much closer to incitement of violence:
the claim that the Second Amendment encompasses a right to revolution
against "tyrannical" government.

Kilgore quotes from Messrs. Carson, Cruz, Huckabee, and Rubio, who
are merely the most egregious demagogues.

In The New Republic, Jeet Heer says that it is much less accurate
to call Donald Trump a "liar" than it is to simply refer to him as "a
bullshit artist." [ . . . ]

A liar is fully aware of what is true and what is not true. They know
whether or not they paid the electricity bill, for example, so when they
tell you that they have no idea why the power is out, that's a lie.

A bullshitter, by contrast, doesn't even care what is true. They're
not so much lying to deceive as to create an impression. Maybe they want
you to be afraid. Maybe they want you to think that they are smarter or
more well-informed than they really are.

It's a useful distinction to make, I think, although I also think
people who engage in a lot of bullshit probably lie their heads off,
too. [ . . . ]

That's a lot of academic language that basically says that stupid
and gullible people are easy to fool. I think we knew that.

But the real key is that, although there is never any shortage of
credulous people, they need to be lied to first before they are led
astray. If you don't exploit their cognitive weaknesses and you lead
them toward the truth, they aren't so misinformed. By constantly
bullshitting them, you're making them less informed and probably
more cynical, too.

Few books have been more influential on my thinking than one I
read when it came out in 1969, Charles Weingarten and Neil Postman:
Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The main argument there
was that the main goal of teaching should be to equip students
with a finely-tuned "bullshit detector," so they would learn to
recognize whenever they were being conned with bullshit. It was
clear to me then that the actual schools I had attended were much
more preoccupied with spreading bullshit than with subverting it,
but then authorities had long viewed schools as factories for
turning out loyal citizen-followers. Didn't really work with me --
some bullshit was much too obvious to miss.

Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition 2016 candidate forum, GOP
frontrunner Donald Trump repeatedly returned to a riff about being a
good negotiator like "you folks." He also said the attendees wouldn't
support him because "I don't want your money."

Early in his remarks, he bragged about how little money he spent on
his campaign thus far, adding, "I think you, as business people, will
feel good about this and respect it."

I suppose you could argue that these old-fashioned Jewish caricatures
weren't anti-semitic because he was so obviously enthralled with those
traits -- maybe the awkwardness was just that he wasn't used to buttering
up an audience so obscenely? And rest assured that the ADL won't be
bothered because he reminded them that "you know I am the best thing
that could ever happen to Israel." Still, I find it all pretty
creepy. For another view, here's
Philip Weiss.

Gary Younge: Bombing Hasn't Worked. Bombing Won't Work. And Yet,
We Will Bomb: I should link to something like this every week.
This one is specifically addressed to the UK, recently deliberating
on whether to join the bombing party in Syria, perhaps out of
nostalgia for the old Triple Entente -- their alliance with France
and Russia which trapped them in the Great War of 1914, although
this time Germany will also be on their side, and they won't have
to wait for the United States to pick up the slack. Wouldn't you
think that someone would have noticed this reunion of the world's
faded imperialist powers, resolved as they are to once again attack
(or as they might prefer to put it, "rescue") an impoverished but
less than properly subservient third world country -- even to have
been a bit embarrassed by the fact? One can't help but be reminded
that Britain and France have still not come to grips with the much
deserved collapse of their worldwide empires. Actually, Younge
gets some of this:

Which brings us neatly to the second point: The West's desire to intervene
in the name of civilization and Enlightenment values betrays a stunning
lack of self-awareness. The military and philosophical force with which
it makes its case for moral superiority, and then contradicts it, is
staggering.

Unfortunately, his first point was not just that bombing never works --
he doesn't recall the Blitz, which mainly consolidated British public
opinion against the Nazis in a way that concern for the Poles never
could have -- but he questioned their seriousness, taunting them to
send ground troops instead. The problem there is that while sufficient
ground troops might be able to advance against ISIS, we know from the
failures of the French and British colonial projects in the Middle
East (and, well, everywhere) as well as the more recent US occupation
of Iraq that a renewed ground invasion will also fail. (If you think
Russia might make the difference, cf. Afghanistan.) Younge admits
that:

ISIS isn't limited to a handful of states in the Middle East, places
like Syria, Iraq, and Libya; instead, it's a multinational phenomenon.
Many of those who terrorized Paris came from Belgium and France. The
West can't bomb everywhere. And wherever it does bomb, it kills and
injures large numbers of civilians. These civilian casualties, in
their turn, stoke resentment and outrage, not least in the Muslim
communities from which jihadis draw their recruits. Since 9/11, the
West's military interventions have created far more terrorists than
they have killed, and have generally made things worse, not better.

Yet Younge adds this snark: "If ISIS represents a true threat
against humanity, as is claimed, then we should do the heavy lifting
of mobilizing humanity to fight it." I suppose he would admit that
mobilizing "the willing" (as Bush did against Iraq) doesn't quite
add up to "humanity," but why taunt people to do the impossible if
they're just going to cheap out and do the expedient anyway? All the
"humanity" that the combined forces of ISIS and the US have managed
to mobilize is a handful of sad European states nostalgic for the
golden days when they thought they ruled the world.

OK, I should find better links to make this point each week.

Also, a few links for further study (even more briefly noted):

Barbara Ehrenreich: Dead, White and Blue: "The Great Die-Off of
America's Blue Collar Whites." This story has been kicking around
for a while, and Ehrenreich covers the basics. But to me the story
has less to do with what's killing people younger than how it upsets
the customary expectations that science and the ever-more-expensive
health care industry will make everyone live longer. It turns out
that how those benefits are distributed matters, and is subject to
politics as well as economics. It also may mean that such progress
itself is tainted: that businesses searching for more profits aren't
necessarily searching for more effective health care. And by the
way, singling out whites hides (or reveals) some other truths:
notably that the things that are killing more whites now are things
that have been depressing the life expectancy of blacks for many
years. One way to put that is that we're leveling down, not up.

Paul Krugman: Challenging the Oligarchy: Review of Robert B Reich's
new book, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (Knopf).
He spends a lot of time talking about Reich's 1991 book The Work of
Nations, which I read at the time (well, a couple years later, in
paperback), thought insane (his thesis that we didn't need to care
about declining low-skill jobs because everyone was going to move
upscale as they learned the arts of symbol manipulation), but found
one brilliant (and scary) insight (the withdrawal of the rich from
mainstream society and into their own gated communities and clubs --
not that the real rich hadn't done that forever). Krugman takes great
pains to demolish the insane part before moving on to the new book
and the messier question of what to do about inequality.

Krugman also has a couple of brief notes about the abuse of
history:
The Farce Is Strong in This One, and
Avars, Arabs, and History. Krugman various dubious lines about the
fall of the Roman Empire and a couple books he's read on the expansion of
Arab influence after 700. I can recommend Timothy Parsons' The Rule of
Empires, which dovetails nicely with what Krugman has learned -- the
first two cases are the Romans in Britain and the Arabs in Spain, both
how they came and why they failed. Parsons piles on eight other case
studies and a postscript about the US in Iraq, showing how empires
always fail.

I've covered three Republican conventions. Watching The Apprentice
was by far the hardest reporting job I've ever endured. If you watched it,
you'd probably agree. But political junkies aren't the type of people who
watched it. Let me tell you a story. Once, when I was in my early 20s, my
parents dragged my entire family to a performance of Donny Osmond in
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It was awful -- and
again, if you watched it, you'd probably agree. When the curtain fell,
every last person in the audience leaped to their feet in a standing
ovation, except me and my three siblings. We sophisticates, we looked
at each other, incredulous, glued to our seats.

Andrea Thompson/Brian Kahn: What Passing a Key CO2 Mark Means to Climate
Scientists: The mark, as measured at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii,
is 400 parts per million. As I recall, Bill McKibben named his organization
350 because that was the highest limit he felt the world could stand. I
think it's safe to say that global warming is no longer a treat. This is
one of those numbers we've been warned about for decades. It's here now,
a fact.

Daily Log

Reading your "What's in a Lie?" piece I was reminded of a book by
Charles Weingarten & Neil Postman called "Teaching as a Subversive
Activity," which argues that the main thing students should learn in
grade school is to develop a sensitive "bullshit detector." The book
was published in 1969. It's almost unimaginable today that anyone
could even propose a curriculum based on questioning authority, even
though the amount of bullshit needing detection has if anything
increased.

Of course, a big part of the reason is that education is
exclusively viewed as credentialism these days. Jane Jacobs, in "Dark
Ages Ahead," identified this as one of the leading indicators of a
coming dark age, whereas back in the 1960s a fair number of us thought
of knowledge as something to pursue for its own sake. Lots of things
made that change, including the ever-increasing price of education and
the corresponding restriction of opportunities outside of the degree
system -- the two are, of course, intimately linked. Also, all that
bullshit.

Letter I wrote to Facebook in response to a question which posited
which one list to check, Spin or Rolling Stone?

I would have thought Spin, but then I figured out a way to run a
test on the data, comparing both lists to my grades. Turns out Rolling
Stone is closer to my taste. There were 17 records on both lists, so
each had 33 unique records. (My data has 34 for RS, so there's a bug
there, but ignore that for now.) I rated 17 of Spin's 33, for an
average grade of 1.5882; I rated 22 of Stone's 34, grading them
1.9545. Spin had 1 A- (Mbongwana Star) and 2 B/worse (Colleen Green,
Mount Eerie). RS had 4 A- (Boz Scaggs, Ashley Monroe, D'Angelo,
Songhoy Blues) and 3 B/B- (Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Florence). I
thought Spin might have more rap/r&b, but the broke exactly the same:
6 common, 5 unique to each (not counting Kamasi Washington on the RS
list). The main difference is that Spin has more alt-rock and metal,
RS has more roots rock and country. Electronica broke 3-1 for Spin;
world 3-1 for RS. RS usually gets slagged for its commitment to
geriatric rock, and there was some of that (Dylan, Richards, Taylor,
Scaggs; I'll stop short of Madonna). RS also has the "Hamilton"
soundtrack -- only list so far to pick that. Still, the bigger problem
is that all lists basically suck. Interesting that the grade average
for the 17 records on both lists is 1.5294, which is worse than the
Spin-only grade. The value of the lists is to see if you can spot
interesting anomalies, not boring trends.